Living Intelligence

What is Living Intelligence?

Living intelligence relates to the aliveness of each citizen through each of their lifecycle stages and the aliveness of the city through its lifecycle stages. Living intelligence asks how can we align and optimize the life of people in the city at each stage of life? How can we align and optimize the lifecycle stage of the city with its people?

Living intelligence asks:

1. How vibrant is the health of this city? What do we notice about the vitality of individuals and all the collectives in the city surviving in an integral way? How are they sustaining themselves bio-physically /psychologically /culturally /socially? Where is the edge of awareness about how the city connects in a sustainable way with its environment?
2. What is the city’s unique value contribution locally and globally? How does the city add value to the eco-region and/or the global flow of resources and vice versa? How does the city replenish the life conditions that support its life?
3. Where is the city’s juice for creating renewal? How are individuals and all the collectives in the city considering the wellbeing of tomorrow’s city unto the 7th generation? How are individuals and all the collectives in the city regenerating their own lives in an integral way? Where are the processes and plans for succession that support people bio-physically /psychologically /culturally /socially?

So What?

As the city complexifies its micro-individual, meso-organization, and macro-community systems interconnect and interplay. Life and death and the health of the city are very much reflected in healthy alignment of all its holons at different stages of life and different levels of scale. The quality of life in the micro reflects the quality of life at the meso and the macro and vice versa. All the holons must be in service to both self and other holons. That is the essence of a healthy life in a healthy living city.

Now What?

Three simple rules for applying Integral City Living Intelligences

1. Honor the dance of life cycles in the city.
2. Integrate the natural cycles of change within the city.
3. Learn how to zoom in and out at different scales to dance with the fractal patterns of the city.

Click here to listen to a podcast on this intelligence from the book Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences in the Human Hive.

Click here to view video of Marilyn Hamilton talking about living systems.